Far North From Reality is a flag with a statement. A state of mind in a particular moment – a time spent in Finish countryside. Far from reality of everyday life, far from reality of news, the artist read there via internet about her country or rest of Europe and world. All of it seemed to be so far away in Finish forest. She hanged this statement on a flagpole in front of the house door.

The ‘Naked Island’ was initially a detention center with the purpose of re-education. People from all over Yugoslavia were brought here without legal procedure or conviction and often didn‘t know the reasons and the logic of the global politics that brought them to the island. The artists found this island a significant place of immanent violence – symbolizing the problem of violent detention and unwilling replacement of people and individual freedom versus state politics and power. This unsolved history had a big emphasis on the Croatian tradition of emigration: in recent years, the amount of people who left the country increased epidemically and now half of the Croatian population lives abroad.

In Full Flow is a project that examines the impact citizens have on pressuring state officials to pass progressive refugee policies. After attending numerous public vigils in solidarity with refugees and researching refugee conditions, Joe Joe Orangias wrote and sent a series of letters to presidents and prime ministers of countries all over the world. This exhibition features enlargements of a selection of his letters, which advocate for welcoming more refugees and highlight citizen participation on this issue.

In his performance de Voin elaborates on collectivity and the ritualistic form of Islam prayer. He uses the ritualistic structure as a form of critic to late-capitalist politics and economics. Hereby he deconstructs the prayers gestures and forms new constellation out of these elements. Through this process, which he defines as a ,re-playing´ of the prayer, this ritual is reinvented. Additional a newly created mantra represents a call for balance, peace, harmony and deception of war. The ritual ,I am a warrior -I am not a soldier´ is composed as a collective ritual where others can join the newly created ritualistic practice.

Is it possible to kill a threat? Can a policy of violence solve problems of violence? In the beginning of the video the artist goes backwards and forwards on an abandoned parking lot in Los Angeles. This represents a movement from the present to the past and then back to the present. The artist: “Five years ago, I went to this abandoned parking lot at West Olympic Blvd. in Beverly Hills. I found this sheet of paper in the watch cabin. I thought it was scary, but interesting. I took it, although I did not know what to do with it. Now I know what to do with it.” The second part of the video takes place in an indoor shooting range in Downtown Los Angeles. The artist literally tries to shoot, to kill the message on the sheet - “I am going to kill you”.

Where there are borders, there is an inside. Within that space - at least theoretical - a center can be defined.

The center of Europe is far more East than Middle-Europeans would intuitively guess. For example,

earlier measurements placed the geographical center in Ukraine. Nowadays, the official center is close to

Vilnius in Lithuania. Thinking about the center makes clear, how diffuse the separation of Europe from Eurasia is.

According to a survey from 2003, and confirmed by a Google Maps entry in 2016, the center of the Earth

is placed close to the Anatolian city Corium in Turkey. This point is calculated by putting all land mass together

and then calculate the center of the big surface calculated before. In my work, I made my way to

that center of the world: 42 52´ N 34 34´ E, with two navigation devices, which led to two different points.

The video shows the journey to find the coordinates.

Katharina Swoboda (Graz, 1984) lives and works between Hamburg, Vienna and Graz. Her work is predominantly

video-based but she also works in photography, installation art and performance art, as well. Swoboda graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. She is member of the Golden Pixel Cooperative in Vienna. www.katharinaswoboda.net

Hristina Tasheva

BIO-ROB 2018

Video, Sound

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BIO - ROB 2018 is a sound work that explores the immigration policy of the European community. The project is a fictional advertisement introducing a new product of Europe Enterprise and Bio Engineering Ltd (a metaphor for the EU): BIO - ROB 2018, posing the questions:

Who is responsible for policies that are defining human beings as "illegal", rejecting to recognise them as citizens? Legal citizens with equal rights, are we aware of our responsibilities for ourselves and for the others? What does it mean "a better life"?